


Six impossible things

by issen4



Category: Gundam Wing, Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: M/M, the underage tag is Duo/Heero
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:00:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25193554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/issen4/pseuds/issen4
Summary: "I can believe in six impossible things before breakfast."- Alice in WonderlandA GW/Iron Man crossover. Takes place in the halcyon days of Iron Man 1 & 2. Edited because I forgot Friday doesn't exist yet.
Relationships: Duo Maxwell/Heero Yuy
Comments: 9
Kudos: 36





	Six impossible things

**Author's Note:**

> One of those thoughts that wake you up in the middle of the night but is not accompanied by a plot. This is all I have.

_"I can believe in six impossible things before breakfast."_

Tony had always taken that line of thought in consideration in his many, many misadventures, so on a beautiful Saturday morning (or was it Sunday), he was all prepared when:

One: Another wormhole had appeared right at the top of the Tower, though not as large;

Two: The teenager with long brown hair in a braid popped out of the said wormhole;

Three: The second teenager followed right after (and the said wormhole closed behind him).

There were only three impossible things here and Tony hadn't even had breakfast yet, so he was waiting for the next three, and life gratifyingly:

"Bombs in the Tower, Sir," Jarvis reported, with a floating schematic that showed him exactly where. His lab.

"What are-how- I'll be there," he said and proved that he was probably the only person he knew who would run _towards_ an incendiary device. Devices.

Nope, the two kids were on his heels, too. That was four and five. Either they hadn't found a better way of getting off the roof or- later, inter-dimensional-travellers were going to have to wait, he had a couple of things to do first-

The bombs were depressingly banal, all plastics and wiring. He could probably disarm them in his sleep, except there were six of them, and the countdown was running down far too quickly for his liking.

"Whoa. Need some help?" 

It took him half a moment to realise it was one of the kids who spoke. Not having the time to ask why they weren't the least alarmed at the sight of potential death and destruction (and had, like him, run towards bombs – that fact required repetition), Tony nodded. "Tools on the shelves behind you," he said, but the other kid, the one who was expressionless and looked like he was born that way, was already rummaging through them, tossing a pair of clippers to his companion.

Tony, who had fortunately gone to bed in the lab, was still wearing the pair of jeans that had tools in his back pocket (thus explaining why his jeans pockets were always torn), nudged his own handy clippers out and went to work. A snip, and that was one.

"C4 again," the first kid muttered beside him. "Why is it, wherever I go, it's C4?"

"Duo." 

Tony glanced up, realising it was the second kid who had spoken. It was a mumble? A name? Never mind, later. Studying the next bomb, he found the wire and cut it, noting that the countdown had also frozen and then depowered like the first one. And then looked up to see that the two kids had disarmed the other four already.

Fast. 

He ought to contact someone regarding this but he didn't know of anyone who knew what to do with teenagers from another universe. Ah well, it wasn’t like he was known for doing things sensibly. Tony said, "All right, now that we have gotten the introductions out of the way, I would invite you to coffee but I'm told that coffee stunts growth, even though Bruce would tell me that it's only an urban myth and no one alive deserves to be without coffee, so we'll call it a token protest-"

The long-haired kid had snorted the moment Tony started talking, the corners of his lips quirking up.

"-Jarvis, mind taking orders from the café downstairs? Make mine a pot, by the way. Extra strong."

"Ooh, mine too!" the long-haired kid exclaimed, almost bouncing on the balls of his feet. He didn't look surprised about Jarvis, and that was a surprise in itself.

Tony raised his eyebrows at him – and his friend, who was scowling, but it was the talkative one who talked.

"Don't look like that, mister, you'll give yourself wrinkles. Well, more wrinkles."

Tony found that there was enough mock indignation even at this hour for him to retort, "Age-baiting? I thought better of someone who would drop out of the sky to help me disarm bombs, but clearly I was wrong, and besides which, don't call me 'mister', you make me sound like we come from a second-rate sci-fi TV show, and clearly that applies only to you because the last I heard, normal teenagers don't travel interdimensionally-"

"Is that even a word?" interrupted the kid, not missing a beat.

"-and that is so a word. I've been in a wormhole so I know it, and for reference's sake my friends call me Tony and my enemies call me 'Mr Stark' which sounds like my father so on the whole I'd prefer Tony."

"Tony Stark." Surprisingly, it was the other kid who spoke.

Tony pointed his screwdriver at him. "No, no, no. People who drop uninvited into my roof should use Tony."

The impassive look he got in return would have turned a wall green with jealousy.

***

[The second conference room, the one with floor-length windows on mumble-mumble-th floor (which was not accessible from the regular elevators) with Tony's type of security, because he was Tony Stark.] 

The long-haired teenager got coffee. And a hot cocoa. And a coke. A slice of cheesecake and a chocolate éclair, and three powdered sugar donuts, which turned his lips and fingers white as he talked a mile a minute. Tony waited until he had exhausted all the extraneous commentary about their meeting, the opinions on him, his tower, his goatee and his technology, and why was someone trying to kill him with bombs, was he actually a bad guy?

"I think you ought to stop avoiding the obvious," Tony said.

The other kid made a sound like a snort and looked pointedly at his companion. 

Who brazened it out with such shocking insouciance that Tony felt a breath of pure envy: "We're from about six universes yonder. Next question."

"Snappy answer, kid. I like that," Tony said. "But it's lacking something." He frowned at the kids. "Look, you've dropped into my tower and drunk my coffee. You understand my language. You haven't exclaimed, 'This is not our world!' I'm guessing that this is a one-way trip."

For the first time, the talkative kid looked uncertain. "Uh, Heero-" Lost for words, even. This _was_ serious.

"Duo, you were the one who suggested we run." 

"Like it's my fault?"

"Yes."

The kid – Duo? What kind of name was that? - clutched his chest dramatically. "I'm so hurt!" he exclaimed. "After all that I've done…" etc, etc.

Tony found himself playing the straight man for once as he waited for the kid to finish. Finally Duo sighed, not at all dramatic now. "We were freedom fighters but of course, that's just terrorists depending on which side you're on," he said. "We were being hunted and I had this totally untested tech, so-" he spread his hands.

"Duo." It came out as a sigh.

"What, Heero? I think that's a pretty good summary, isn't it?"

Heero – again, what kind of name was that? – said nothing but his silence was telling.

Tony drank his own coffee, making his own conclusions. "If people were hunting down kids like you, it means that either they were very evil or you are very dangerous."

Duo stabbed a fork into his cheesecake and took off a good half of it. He crammed the forkful into his mouth and raised an eyebrow, an invitation for Tony to continue.

"And given that you were desperate enough to not only use untested tech but to use it six times-" though Tony doubted it was only six, "-it means that you didn't expect to survive being captured."

Duo had stopped chewing and was looking down at the rest of his coffee. 

"Or something worse. So you tried escaping. And your boyfriend – Heero, is it? – came with you." That wasn't a guess: judging by the looks they exchanged, it was easy to deduce that they weren't just friends, or even best friends – this was a co-dependent relationship that went past teenage infatuation and all the way into following the other unto death. He just wondered if Duo knew it yet.

Duo blinked and looked at Heero, as though suddenly reminded of something. "I nearly forgot that. You followed me, Heero? You could have died!"

Heero didn't raise an eyebrow but Tony could tell that he was sighing on the inside. "Yes, Duo."

"It means you really love-" Duo paused, the teasing tone gone.

"Yes, Duo."

"But Heero-" he spotted Tony, and clammed up.

Tony made a 'go-ahead' gesture, though it was obvious what he wanted to say. Teenagers could be extremely oblivious. And reckless. Oh well, who was he to talk? 

"You didn't have to. Relena would have-"

"I don't love Relena." 

This was the week for seeing people stare without blinking at each other, apparently. It was getting awkward, getting between two love-struck teenagers. "Can we get back to the earlier topic?" he asked.

Duo put down his fork. "Heero," he said. "You're better at this than me."

Heero looked blank. Blanker. Tony thought, not for the first time, that his eyes were the most intensely blue that Tony had ever seen. That combined with the East Asian cast of his facial features (Japanese, at a guess), made for a striking combination. 

Finally Heero spoke. "I'm Heero Yuy and he's Duo Maxwell. In our world, we are- were Gundam pilots."

"The what pilots?"

Tony couldn't stop himself from interrupting after only hearing the beginnings of the explanation. "That's the biggest steaming pile of horseshit I've ever heard. 'Mobile suits' indeed!"

"And flying around in a titanium suit of armor isn’t?" Duo rested his chin on two fists as he gazed at Tony like a kindergartener, all fake innocence. 

Ah. So the kids _had_ spotted the suits and deduced what they were for. That was a point – several points in their favour, for two kids who came from another universe.

"There's no such alloy as gundanium."

"Not on earth."

"It's made in space," Tony concluded, rubbing his goatee, marvelling at the logistics that would have to occur for that to happen. "All right, that could maybe work. But colonies at the LaGrange points?"

"Don't tell me you haven’t thought about it. Once your world develops space colonies." 

Duo was again uncannily fast. 

Touché. "So your universe, or more precisely, your earth developed rather differently," Tony mused. "Why are your eyes purple?" he asked, both to catch Duo off-guard and out of pure curiosity. It was, alarmingly, a true purple, not the light brown shade that translated into violet, like those of a model he'd dated once.

"Genetic manipulation," Duo said immediately. "Done in-vivo."

Tony's ire rose, the very idea making his stomach rebel.

"And in-vitro, which hurt like hell, I can tell you. The colour is incidental: they were trying for perfect eyesight and protection from radiation in space. They did it more to Heero, so his eyes just look that blue instead. Side effects include heightened reflexes, genius-level intelligence and a smidgen of mental instability."

"That last one came naturally."

Duo nearly fell off his chair. "Heero, give me some warning when you do that!" he exclaimed, his chair wobbling dangerously before he righted it with an exaggerated gesture. "I can't get used to the fact that you have a sense of humour!" he complained. 

"He said they did it to you too," Tony said to Heero, trying not to imagine his blood pressure shooting up. If there was one thing guaranteed to get to him like no other, it was the suggestion that a human being was born – was created – to fulfil a function. Not to mention the de-humanising parts of that, of course.

"Engineered to be a super-soldier," Duo said, his voice between pride and irritation. "Trained to be perfect."

Tony's anger grew. As a (previous) defence contractor, he had read through enough briefs about creating so-called perfect soldiers to know that the most promising of them were a mix of extreme physical training and psychological torture on children - and they didn't even _work_ properly, judging by how Heero must have long broken out of what had to be brutal conditioning. The signs were there in his stoic, controlled manner; the fight was in still in him, judging by the fact that he was here with Duo.

"Also a perfect bastard," Duo went on, his voice teasing. 

Expressionless, Heero forked the remaining half of Duo's cheesecake and ate it, jamming it into his mouth as he gazed at his boyfriend without any thought of neatness and all thoughts of vengeance. 

That, too.

"I rest my case." Duo drained his coffee.

***

"You're welcome to stay for as long as I can pick your brains," Tony said, handing out two mobile phones that identified them as occupants of the tower. 

Duo's finger was already swiping over the screen, his eyes studying it. "Or you can tell the world that I'm your secret love child, I don't mind."

"What about Heero?"

"Cousin."

"You do realise that some people get uncomfortable about cousin-"

"Totally cousins. How else can we freak people out?" Duo looked up at him. "Right?"

And that was six. Tony swallowed, then rearranged his expression. "Ah, Duo, you are my child indeed. Come to Papa-"

"Tony."

He stopped and looked at Heero. "Yes." 

"How will you explain our presence? You are a public figure." 

Barely hours in this new universe, and he'd gain enough context. The kid deserved the dignity of a serious answer. "Secret love child," Tony said. "Yes, really. You would not believe the number of people who approach tabloids to claim that I'm their father. (Rather obviously, there's no evidence, but why let a little thing like that stop them?)"

Duo and Heero looked at each other. "About that," Duo started.

The cloudburst of another explosion in the distance cut them off.

/end


End file.
